Silent Retreat:
A Solo Summer Road Trip

Silent Retreat is a two-book collection chronicling five weeks alone on the road across the United States. On a June afternoon in 2024, André Rober Beriau left Worcester, MA bound for Santa Fe, New Mexico - with plans to spend the summer working on a memoir about his two years in Sierra Leone. When the trip didn’t unfold the way he expected, he rolled out of the Land of Enchantment and let fate take over.

 

Across Colorado, the Four Corners, the wide-open stretches of the Southwest, and accidentally on a stage in Los Angeles,  he collected photographs, receipts, maps, and the random ephemera of daily travel. The result is a 130-page visual scrapbook capturing the texture and mood of life lived out of a car.

 

Paired with it is a 144-page companion book of journals and reflections, a written record of the solitude, uncertainty, and unexpected clarity that surfaced along the way. Together, they offer an intimate, immersive retelling of a summer spent reaffirming one's core identity while wandering the highways of America.